There is a vast, bright, rich world where Zorro lives – an explosive world of sight and action and swift, acute comprehension. It is ever out of my reach. But here are some things I know about him from observation, through things we share as vertebrates and as companions, and through knowledge scientists have gained through technology. Zorro, of course, knows things about me, too.

Zorro, the Red-tailed Hawk, was born with the potential attributes of a gifted aerial hunter. That imperative defines him – he hasn’t a wide choice of vocations. Some of these attributes came fully developed; some developed with learning and practice. Some responses and actions are hormone driven: the urge to find a mate. Some require a lifetime of shaping: prey animals don’t want to die, and Zorro has to learn how to out-think and out-maneuver them. Zorro’s reaction times are much faster than ours; this greatly alters the way the world looks and feels. Yet, as Darwin pointed out more than 100 years ago, all vertebrates share basic biology, including brain/nerve structures – that is, cognition and emotion. Different? Of course. Lesser? Not so. Each animal has the brain that allows him to thrive in a certain world. To be a jack-of-all-trades requires too many expensive tools for a wild thing.

1. Zorro was born with the urge to chase and hunt. He knew he needed meat and refused fruits and vegetables. For the first month, he had to be fed tiny strips of flesh. His parents prepared his food and put into his open mouth. Then larger hunks, then bone, then he was able to tear his own meat. At 30 days, he was still dependent, but he knew what he wanted and needed. At this point, he was brought to live with humans. We can’t really know the extent of the changes this made in his life. But he left his wild home just when his parents would have introduced him to living prey. They would catch and immobilize a gopher or mouse and drop it in the nest for the youngsters to squabble over, kill, and eat. This type of support would eventually get the youngsters out of the nest and foraging. Human surrogates try to replicate Mom and Dad’s routine, but it is not easy.

Zorro had to learn how to forage for himself. When we met, I was the enemy. He was convinced I’d steal his food, even if I’d just offered it to him. He had to learn to know me. Soon, he trusted me and I was able to hide meat or pull it on a string to begin to teach him the hunt. He learned things I wish he hadn’t. The sight of a plastic bag draws instant attention: food! He learned through his own perceptions; I taught by repeated actions (some inadvertent!).

2. Zorro was born with extraordinary eyesight. Hawks have about a million photoreceptors per square millimeter (we have about 100,000), and four to five kinds of color receptors (we have three); some of his are double-cells; some are graced with intensifying oil droplets. He has two focal points in each eye and a receptor-rich strip we dub the infula. He can focus on objects binocularly, as we do, but he can spot details of his prey from 8 to 10 times further away. He can simultaneously focus on the side, looking out for danger. He can follow complex action even as he dives on his prey.

He had to learn to use his amazing eyes effectively. He learned that the rabbit he’d watched vanish into a bush was still there: he learned to wait. He learned that his box in my car meant we were going hunting. He learned to recognize a vulture at just a glance: nothing to worry about. An eagle, nearly the same size, elicits acute attention.

3. He has keen hearing – not as keen as that of owls, but he hears extremely well.

He had to learn what sounds mean. In one day, he learned a whistle meant food. After two days, I couldn’t sneak up on his mews to observe him. He heard me, and met my eye at the peep-hole in the door. He learned to recognize the house door opening. The sound of my voice. The sound of my car. He learned the local hawks’ voices. He sometimes calls out to a female Red-tail who co-owns the meadow he lives in. He’s silent around ravens and owls. Rustles in the underbrush can mean prey or predator. Which is it? Not even food draws his attention until he’s sure.

4. Zorro has a sense, which I can’t identify, of place. From his closed box, he knew when we approached a familiar hunting spot. He’d begin moving about. Birds seem to have an awareness of the electromagnetic field of the earth. An electromagnetic map in the brain? I rehabbed a hawk who demonstrated this long ago. We don’t yet understand it.

He learned this by the time we’d been to our hunting field twice. What cues was he absorbing, responding to?

5. He has a sharp beak. He was born knowing how to use it to defend himself and tear food.

Some self-attention seemed to need practice. At the beginning he didn’t groom much. But he was soon wiping his beak after a meal and carefully preening his feathers. He can reach his oil gland at the base of his tail with his beak, turning his head 270 degrees. Life without hands is a challenge!

6. His sharp talons and strong feet are his primary weapons. He will automatically grab anything approaching at chest height, as a defense. He has toes with a ratchet mechanism that lets him lock on. He was born knowing how to grab and make killing motions.

Zorro in Red-tail juvenile feathering. Compare this with the picture at the head of this article.

He had to learn to grab prey by the head so he wouldn’t be injured in the struggle. More than one falconry bird has caught a squirrel by the back end, only to have the squirrel turn in the bird’s grip and bite a toe off. Zorro lost a rat by grabbing it awkwardly. The next one was not so lucky.

7. He was born with the basics of flight, and the urge to fly. But his beginning flights were weak and awkward, the landings wobbly.

He had to learn flight refinements, which he couldn’t do in a mews or on a leash line or even frequent hunts. After being out on his own for two weeks, he was a complete aerialist. He could take off straight up, fly loops, soar, nail landings. Zorro experiences flight to the max!

8. Caution is as important as food for survival. As a chick, Zorro was at first unaware of danger – his belly was empty! His parents not only fed, but protected him, fiercely.

He learned, probably from watching his parents, to be cautious. He looked around carefully whenever I took him out of his mews. A large bird cruising by could be dangerous! What were the dogs up to? When set free, he flew immediately into a dense tree. He did not come out even for food for many minutes. He quickly learned to evade the owls at night and the ravens and strange people by day. If he hadn’t, he would be dead by now.

9. He knew nothing about traffic. Soon after release, he was seen on the edge of the road, eating something. Too close for safety!

Luckily he learned about traffic. Now he flies up and away at the sound of an approaching car. He likes to fly along the road, perhaps because it is clear yet with trees close by if he needs to hide. He will veer away from the road sharply, though, when he hears a car coming.

10. Zorro didn’t know his territory well, before release, even though I hunted him there. I left him once, for several hours; when I came back, he practically jumped into my arms. He immediately fell asleep in his mews, head tucked into his scapular feathers. But happily went back next day.

He has learned his territory. He has several territories – sometimes he leaves the meadow for days. So he must have, in each, places to sleep in safely, places from which he can wait for prey, particular trees where he goes to eat. He knows his territories so well, that once when he returned from a long absence, he came looking for me in the woods. I do not believe he has a continuous territory, but overlapping circles, which he can learn and monitor. A whole ten mile area would be too much, or so I believe.

A Note on Brains: “In the past few decades, scientists have learned that the basis of everything they thought they knew about bird brains—that they were largely comprised of the most primitive and instinctual of brain structures—was wrong. Fully 75 percent of the brains of parrots, hummingbirds, and thousands of other species of birds is actually made up of a sophisticated information-processing system that works much the same way as the locus of human higher-mindedness, the cerebral cortex.” —Lexi Krock (from Nova)

]]>http://takethemoment.org/?feed=rss2&p=9200The Second Life of Zorrohttp://takethemoment.org/?p=860
http://takethemoment.org/?p=860#commentsMon, 10 Jul 2017 18:58:06 +0000http://takethemoment.org/?p=860Continue reading →]]>The Second Life of Zorro

Part 1 – Can this Red-tailed hawk be saved?

Zorro

In May 2016, Zorro hatched somewhere in the agricultural fields south and east of Sacramento, California. While still a nestling, he was struck down by West Nile Virus (WNV), in birds, a dire disease spread largely by mosquitoes. Zorro and one sibling were found, weak and sick, by a Good Samaritan, who took them to Dr. Vicky Joseph at the California Foundation for Birds of Prey.

Dr. Joseph, who founded CFBP, is a highly valued avian veterinarian in Northern California. She takes in many injured or orphaned raptors every year, with the intent of restoring them, healthy and vigorous, back to their wild lives. Problems vary: they are hit by cars; attacked by predators (even other raptors); they starve though bad luck or inexperience; they crash into windows or wind turbines; they are electrocuted or poisoned. Raptors also suffer from diseases that range from aspergillosis (a fungal disease), to tuberculosis and malaria, to parasitic invasions. Recently cases of WNV have increased, and the virus itself is rapidly changing, out-maneuvering other species’ evolving immunology. In individual cases, it often seems to be on a loop – apparent recovery, relapse, another recovery, and so on, the final outcome depending not only on the excellence of medical care, but on the genetic background, strength, and determination of the bird. The disease in Zorro attacked his feather follicles. All his primary wing feathers and his tail feathers fell out. Luckily they grew back, apparently normally. He survived Round One.

With new-grown feathers, Zorro was put into a flight cage with several other young Red-tails, where he stayed for some months. In autumn, Dr. Joseph decided he was ready for close assessment and for flight and hunt training. Falconers can supply a great deal of experience in a relatively safe environment, supporting naïve hunters with food and hunting opportunities. I fetched Zorro home with me on October 9 to start this process. He was spectacularly beautiful, with a dramatic salmon wash on his new tail feathers and a startling chiaroscuro of deep brown and sparkling white on chest and belly.

Zorro’s tail – note that the feathers are not rusty red, like adult tail feathers, but washed in salmon over the juvenile stripes. Note too the odd splashes of white.

Young raptors raised by people, even when not mal-imprinted in the first weeks of life, do not fit all the behavior patterns of normal wild birds. (See the post on “imprinting.”) They are generally not afraid of people (though this changes after release), and even when they have not been hand-fed, they know the source of all meals: the human! In wild-caught raptors, on the other hand, there is a learning curve in which the bird comes to associate the falconer with food and to trust that he or she is not dangerous. Soon these birds are performing for “treats” – jumping several feet for tidbits, for example, to get exercise before they are ready for flying outside. Throughout, though, there is that deep wild caution around all people that makes a wild raptor a bit shy and not food-aggressive. He will slash at you if you move a bare hand too close, out of self-preservation. But he is less likely to tear you up to get goodies out of your fingers, which can be a danger with hand-reared youngsters if the falconer is not careful.

Zorro was an especially laid-back acclimated youngster. He trusted me quickly, never attempted to hurt me as I put on jesses, cleaned his mews, weighed him, and so on. But the danger was that he might begin to scream and snatch food if I fed him directly – young birds do this with their parents, too. I had to be careful not to encourage this.

The first ten days with Zorro were difficult. He hated the hood. He hated the scale. He hated his perch. He was in the house and he was so powerful that he dragged his heavy (15 lbs +) perch, to which he was leashed, clear across the floor. When I put it on a rough rubber pad, he dragged pad and all. He bated and dangled from my glove not just the hour or so one expects as a new bird gets used to you, but without stop. So I consulted an experienced falconer, who suggested I drop hood training and set up a new mews with a high perch and a whole different routine. “Make him happy about something!”

Zorro in his new digs. He can hop down to the bow perch or his bath pan at will, and fly back up. The leash is long enough so he can’t dangle. And not so long he’ll get tangled up. The shelf behind the perch is shallow – easy to clean and not so deep that he can’t hop up and out of it. The vertical bars prevent entry of predators, such as raccoons, and also keep Zorro from clinging to the window and breaking feathers.

A week later, on a 4′ high corner perch in a small shed with good light and air, Zorro was a different bird. He had become calm, content, even tempered. The bating to get away was gone – replaced soon by bating to get out into the hunt. I’d had him for less than three weeks.

Part II – Flying and hunting

Zorro and I on the day of his release. He is wearing anklets, but no other tethers. In a moment after this photo, I cut the anklets off. Photo by Greg Montillier

Training a Rehab Juvenile Red-tail

Falconry is a “sport” in which the hunter uses the bird to kill prey. (Unlike hunting dogs, birds never bring dinner back to the falconer – who has to approach the bird and try to convince her that she’s getting a good deal to let go of her prize!) For our native species, this means that usually the falconer is required to capture only an advanced fledgling – say in about September – tame her down a bit, use food as a reward, and quickly get her returning to him at a signal. This bird will fly, untethered, to a falconer’s gloved fist for a tidbit. He then takes the bird into the field and hunts with her. Most of these are young birds who are not thriving well on their own. So many young raptors die the first year, many from not having figured out the refinements of hunting, so they starve. (Zorro, as we know, had come in ill.)

Zorro on the lookout for a bunny as the falconers beat the bushes. Photo by Mark Moore

The falconer is, in this case, NOT imprinting the bird on humans; it’s too late for a classic malimprintation. And he usually releases such a bird at the end of hunting season, February or March, or for rehab birds, even earlier, in November or December, and lets it go on about its hawkish business. Such a bird may be “acclimated” to humans, but really will not approach unknown people unless it is starving, and sometimes not even then. (It would be a pretty poor falconer to work with a bird that then starved!) You might be surprised what these birds will eat when the larder is bare.

Zorro on his first rabbit – first day in the field. Good boy, Zorro! Photo by Mark Moore

When falconers work with rehab groups, they will be given a young bird that is already acclimated to humans, owing to having been caged, fed, and medicated. This young bird needs “wilding up.” Yet it is important to retain its non-fear responses with the falconer. And that combination is tricky. Again, the falconer uses food, but cautiously. A young bird who knows a person has food in his hand or pocket will scream and sometimes get aggressive. What I have done is tether that young bird to a perch and toss food when she isn’t watching – usually in the dark! Later I will attach a long leash called a creance to her jesses and take her out in the yard where I have cached food. Or I’ll attach food to a line and move the item in the grass and let the bird “catch” her dinner. Next, I will release, say, live rats or mice (sad, but much what the parent does. Some falconers use rabbits.). After a couple of weeks of this, the bird associates the falconer, if all has worked according to Hoyle, whoever that was, with successful hunting, and you can release the bird, jessed but not attached to you or a perch, in the yard or a field, and try to scare up some prey. Or continue to release rats and mice. So it went with Zorro.

Zorro caught a wild rabbit on his first hunting day. This was unusually good work!

Zorro on his outside perch. He is tethered to a long creance and can fly about 120 feet and back (closely supervised so he won’t tangle), for exercise in any weather.

Now, if the falconer can hunt with the bird every other day for a couple of weeks, she is probably ready to be released. The drawback here is that this bird has not had parents to teach her caution, and many of these young birds fall prey to Great Horned Owls quickly. They seem to escape diurnal predators more easily. Some youngsters are more naturally cautious than others.

Zorro was almost ready for release in December 2016 but the weather was dreadful, and Dr. Joseph asked me to keep him until spring. I wanted to watch out for his feather development during the molt, and monitor him for eye problems (WNV often scars the retina of infected birds) and neurological problems (also a danger with WNV). Zorro has shown some very mild odd neuro responses, occasional small repetitive motions someone who didn’t know him might not notice. They seem not to interfere with his thinking and actions.

Releasing Zorro

I couldn’t hunt him in the Valley during December and January, owing to weather and to a vision problem I had, so whenever we had a day or half day of no rain, I flew him in a field belonging to my neighbor. A huge lovely meadow, maybe 1/2 mile long. We didn’t catch anything during the rains, but that area is normally, in spring and summer, alive with mice and gophers. So in March, when Zorro was getting really anxious and wanting to go free, I removed all the restraints so he wouldn’t get caught up on something, and let him go in the meadow. He was awkward at first, not having really flown vigorously owing to the rain. I went down daily with a commercially grown, formerly frozen quail, whistled, and fed him. I didn’t get him to come to the hand – I didn’t want that. So I’d toss his dinner and watch him fly for it. His flight improved enormously very quickly.

Ready to fly free! Note the tethers. They were removed. Photos by Greg Montillier

Today (mid-July 2017), I go to his field maybe three times a week. More if he seems hungry. He’s feeding himself and learning about life. There’s an older large female who claims that field as part of her territory, and she was tolerant of him for awhile. But I think that may be changing.

When my car pulls into the dirt road near the meadow gate, Zorro is often on one of the power poles waiting for me. He undoubtedly hears and recognizes the car. He greets me with a long look and a tail shake, and a poop! Then he flies down, grabs the half-quail I toss him, and flies off. Sometimes he isn’t hungry enough to fly for the food. Just sits and looks around.

Zorro’s first free flight! Photo by Greg Montillier

In early July he began to seem bit nervous. Looking around constantly, not too interested in food. And I often heard the female nearby. She gives a long falling cry “keeeyrrrrr” every minute or so when I’m around. After July 4, I hadn’t seen Zorro at all for five days, though I saw and heard the lady, whom I call Sky Queen. I began to think Zorro’d taken off to search for a territory of his own. But on July 9, at about 7:30 in the evening, I went down to the meadow, chased the female off a big dead pine, and then explored the thick oak woods up on the ridge. I was looking for Zorro feathers. His molt seemed to be going normally (and I’d kill for one of those gorgeous juvie tail feathers!). I explored for about an hour, and then rested under a large oak to catch my breath.

And suddenly there Zorro was! He’d found me in the woods. Had he been following me? Had he waited till I got into the deep shadows, so he’d avoid the ferocious Queen? I have no idea. I tossed him half a quail and away he went, keeping close to the edge of the meadow.

“I’m ready to go. Just get these anklets off me!”

You may be thinking: this bird is going to approach people! But no. If anyone is with me, Zorro doesn’t show a feather. He knows me, probably better in ways than I know myself. But, with two exceptions, he is not going to get anywhere near another human being. The two exceptions are Greg Montilier whose field Zorro now treats as home, and Stephanie Golden, an old friend who visited me for a week. Greg he has known for some time. Steffi he just – accepted! People often ask: Can these birds tell the difference between one person and another? Yes, indeed they can. Some hawks like some people and dislike others. Their eyesight is many many times more acute than yours and mine! But there is also an element of individual assessment and decision at work.

I hope Zorro sorts things out with the Sky Queen. If not, he will leave the meadow and find his own territory. I’d be happy if he stayed. With Dr. Joseph’s encouragement, I’d love to watch Zorro develop – be privy to his private hawk life. Clearly he doesn’t need the food I give him – he’s plump and sassy on his own, and while I wet down the food in this hot weather, there’s a spring in the meadow, so he won’t dehydrate. I’d like to see him with a mate and youngsters of his own. It’s happened!

I became a falconer so I could help youngsters like Zorro who have been in rehab and missed the mom-and-pop lessons. I can only say that I have given the birds I work with a second chance. How good? I have no idea. I have released three now. I was able to monitor only Zorro for any length of time. There are good and bad points to this process. But it is a chance. Just a chance. A better chance, in my opinion, than simply releasing young birds who’ve had no parental lessons to fall or fly on their own.

Zorro today, at the end of his first molt.

What I have learned, mostly from falconer/hawk-listener Mark Moore and Dr. Joseph, is what strong family ties some raptor species have. Red-tails and Kestrels in particular. Adults look out for their children, siblings connect with each other, stay together, vocalize and socialize and share food, even with squabbles. This, I’m sure, provides a good base for survival. That is the best chance the youngsters have for a full, rich, hawk life! But we humans do what we can.

Go with the wind, Zorro.

]]>http://takethemoment.org/?feed=rss2&p=8605What Is Imprinting in Birds?http://takethemoment.org/?p=876
http://takethemoment.org/?p=876#respondFri, 06 Jan 2017 21:54:45 +0000http://takethemoment.org/?p=876Continue reading →]]>Birds have extraordinary capabilities – very different in many ways from mammals, and all aimed at flying efficiently, keeping safe, getting food, and reproducing. We used to think of bird brains as the lowest thinking machines in vertebrate life, but in fact, birds are extremely intelligent, each species finely tuned for its role in its habitat. Crows, parrots, pigeons, and other species have been recorded performing as well as primates on various tests. The tests revealed subtle learning in these feathered miracles. And this has changed our tendency to think of birds as having all their behavior hard-wired like automatons. Driven entirely by a phenomenon, long considered much lower than our learning patterns, called “instinct.”

I teach classes about raptors – and one of the first things I point out about behavior has to do with “instinct.” We all have some behavior that is instinctive, that is, not specifically learned. Yes, even humans. Instinctive behaviors are part of a developmental process. As the individual animal matures, certain classes of behavior and development are triggered at certain times, usually with the timed release of certain chemicals. For these developmental triggers to be effective, there is often a window of opportunity in which these vital behaviors can click on and begin to mature. In people, language development is one such. It is now accepted fact that if humans do not hear language and are not spoken to as infants, after a certain period, they will simply not be able to learn to speak. The language button has not been activated and the opportunity has been lost. That individual will never speak a language, will never be able to communicate verbally with another person. Indeed children so deprived usually do not survive very long.

In birds, many more behaviors are part of a developmental system and need to be “turned on” at the appropriate time. When a very young chick (the age varies with species) is first aware of the creature feeding it, it will identify itself with that creature. Ducklings have imprinted on humans or chickens, and so on. In raptors, the critical time is some days after hatching. With some, it is when the eyes open and the chick can see the parent come up with food. With owls, whose hearing is vital to their survival, the chicks can imprint on a human voice in the absence of a parental owl conversation.

Birds imprint on parents, later on siblings, on the nest, and even on the natal area (young birds often return to hatch area to breed). These “sets” help with social development, including breeding behavior. A bird mal-imprinted on humans, rather than properly imprinted on their own kind, will seek human breeding partners. They will not be able to properly reproduce. Some birds that are raised in captivity often imprint on humans for food and yet, when put in with other youngsters of its kind, avoid other behavioral missteps. Sometimes this imprinting takes place later – a young raptor for instance raised in a chamber even with other young raptors and with an adult as a model, can still get food aggressive with a human who is working with him – he will scream at that person demanding food (as he would of a parent at the same age in the wild – there’s a reason the adults drive teenagers away from their territory!). In all other respects, the youngster may have developed normal social behavior, however, and if put into a flight cage and tossed food, he may well “wild up.”

Instinctive behavior is very complex. In classes for grade schoolers, I like to say that instinctive learning means that the bird is born with an encyclopedia in his brain, ready to supply needed information and habits when they are properly triggered.

]]>http://takethemoment.org/?feed=rss2&p=8760Power & Beauty: Camouflagehttp://takethemoment.org/?p=846
http://takethemoment.org/?p=846#respondThu, 20 Oct 2016 21:41:24 +0000http://takethemoment.org/?p=846Continue reading →]]>This creature is the Soybean Looper (Chrysodeixis includens), a moth considered a “pest.” In parts of the world, it decimates soybean crops. Also likes to munch on members of the cabbage family.

Chrysodeixis is a “scientific” word-conglomerate that indicates “golden pointer,” as near as I can tell. And if you look at the critter, you’ll see its little gold finger. “Looper” because its caterpillar stage is one of those green ones that hump up in the middle (making a loop) as it walks.

Look at its eye. Insect eyes are not like ours (see the wonderful Evolution’s Witness, by Ivan Schwab, on the evolution of the marvelous eyes of this planet). They are basically a strip of many eyes, called “ommatidia.” The specific form varies by species, and I have not found a description of this one. Moth eyes are geared to seeing at night (light sensitivity) or by day (color information) or in some species active at both times, both. But in the photo, this one looks as it is staring right at me, through the rust bristles that look like bark detritus, as if to say, “I’m not here, really.” It even has what passes as a catch light – that bright spot light puts in vertebrate eyes.

Taken all together, this is the most queerly formed camouflage I’ve seen – lumpy and hairy and resembling old splintered wood.

]]>http://takethemoment.org/?feed=rss2&p=8460What Do We See?http://takethemoment.org/?p=813
http://takethemoment.org/?p=813#commentsSun, 31 Jul 2016 19:40:19 +0000http://takethemoment.org/?p=813Continue reading →]]>Pt. Reyes National Seashore, with its hundreds of protected creatures peacefully sharing the world with us, is a magical relief from human cares. Over the years, I’ve seen, locking antlers in the autumn, Tule Elk, once killed off here and reintroduced in the 1970s by the state, Peregrine Falcon youngsters chasing each other along McClure Beach in mid-June, Red-tailed Hawks windsurfing in November, Northern Harriers galore always, American Kestrels hovering in August, Coyotes lurking, a dozen Great Blue Herons rapidly fishing the shoreline of Tomales Bay for food for heronlets, Osprey diving, sea lions, harbor and fur seals, sea otter, sand dollars, jelly fish, countless butterflies, and recently three very small bunnies sharing a sunset path with a half-dozen California Quail. People have twice sent me hurrying toward a cove on the ocean side of the peninsula with a report of whales, who didn’t wait for me, alas.

This year, I went with a friend in mid-July. Mid-July is not a super-dramatic time for most wildlife – the migrating critters are not yet getting ready to leave; this year’s chicks, cubs, fawns, and other younglings have been encouraged to leave home and are, somewhere, struggling to learn to live on their own. Some of them know from their parents how vital caution is, and make that caution rule hunger. Of course some of them didn’t get it, and their shenanigans have probably already attracted the predators Mom and Dad used to keep away. Life in the Wild makes its own good use of foolish neophytes.

Mid-July. Warm, breezy, sleepy. At Abbott’s Lagoon, the other afternoon, time and the sun seemed to creep along, and nothing was stirring.

Dune Time

Oh, but look . . . some things had been stirring, and they left the proof behind. See where creatures – elephants? elves? creepy-crawlies? have crossed the dunes for water in the early morning? Time hasn’t yet obliterated the big shapeless tracks deep in the sand, the little tracks skimming the surface, the miniature tank-track of a snake, the mystery movers, the ripple of the wind. All forming the lovely criss-cross of a summer night’s dance.

Heron, Mr. Wind, Unidentified, and Small Rodent

Snake’s Tank-Trail (Look Closely) and the Mysterious Cord

Heron, Bunny, Snake, and Mystery Critter

]]>http://takethemoment.org/?feed=rss2&p=8133Notes on Surviving in the Wildhttp://takethemoment.org/?p=811
http://takethemoment.org/?p=811#respondTue, 19 Jul 2016 16:34:50 +0000http://takethemoment.org/?p=811Continue reading →]]>In recent years, an observer I trust has reported some interesting wrinkles on the behavior of wild raptors – specifically, a family of Red-tails, a family of American Kestrels, and a family of Cooper’s Hawks, all in the fields and woods around Davis, California.

Red-tails are common raptors throughout the country, familiar to all of us. These had a nest in a median between two major highways near Sacramento. It was not a large area, and it seemed obvious that it was dangerous – surely young fledglings would get hit on the roads – a fate not uncommon to naive or distracted raptors. But surprisingly, the three chicks in the nest fledged safely and began their after-nest schooling. They would flap and flap, jump up and down, fly short distances and crash land. The parents brought dead prey close by and dropped it for the youngsters to find. Later, the prey was alive and the young hunters had to learn to kill it. This was all as expected. What wasn’t nearly as familiar was the solicitous behavior of the parent birds when danger was near. As the sun went down and the scary Owl Hour set in, they called to the youngsters and seemed to encourage them to seek safety in dense cover. Great Horned Owls are among the most ferocious predators young hawks face. They are silent and surprisingly fast – well named “The Tigers of the Forest.” In full light, the parent birds were also vigilant – they quickly decided that the human who kept coming to their area and hanging around was bad! They would fly up, calling and urging the young hawks to move away.

Red-tailed Hawk Hatchling

As the weeks went by, the youngsters began hunting on their own, but at the least sign of an intruder, that is, when the observers got too close, for example, one or both parents would appear. Finally, one of the young hawks disappeared, and the observers were sad, thinking she – probably female since she was larger than her siblings – might have gotten killed. She was very dark, a relatively rare color morph in Red-tails, and quite beautiful and energetic. What had happened to her?

A few days later, to our relief, she reappeared, and before the old birds could intervene, eagerly accepted the offering of a road-killed jackrabbit tossed into the field. It seemed that the hawklets were slowly getting ready to disperse. Young Red-tails usually take off around 8 weeks or so after hatching. They have been reported as traveling North out of California, even as far as Idaho. Some seem to come back in a year or two at breeding season. The dispersal represents the critical danger period in young raptors’ lives: no longer protected and fed by the parents, they must cope on their own. A very large percentage don’t make it through the first year.

The American Kestrel family – Kestrels are the smallest falcons in the US – a year ago raised its five chicks in one of the many kestrel nest boxes around Davis. All seemingly healthy and inquisitive. When the first three bopped out of the boxes, they were unable to fly well and hopped around after insects on the ground or climbed, literally, back up into the box, like little woodpeckers. This is danger time. Crows, jays, other raptors, foxes, coyotes, cats – every other predator around, hearing the cries of young kestrels, zooms into action. The mother of these youngsters, however, was an Amazon. She fiercely attacked anything that came at her babies, once even riding a crow, latching onto his back and digging in. He was much larger than she, but she rode him out of the area. A falconer, watching her exhausting routine, caught two of the babies and took them home for some free meals. They were charming little guests, flying onto his head or up onto the ceiling fan, calling out, and clearly enjoying their free meals. In two days, seeing that they were now flying competently, he returned them. The parent birds came up to them immediately and there was a joyous reunion. The smallest and probably the youngest of the five babies was a little male, which the falconer now took in for treats. He was friendly and sweet and ate up a storm. In two days, he too was ready for sustained flight, so the falconer let him ride on his hand as he drove back to the field where the nest box hung. Before they reached the box site, the little male began to cry “killy killy,” and look out the car window. There were answering cries, and when the little creature flew out of the car and into the field, his siblings and a parent surrounded him, calling out and flying in circles. You could invent wonderful dialogue for this scene, if you were inclined to conflate human and avian feelings, and I give you my permission to do so and have fun. Interestingly enough, a year later, the same nestbox produced another large family. They are still together, siblings and parents, more than 8 weeks after hatching! (These little guys fledge in about 3 – 4 weeks.) We don’t think of raptors, generally, as warm and connected family groups, but we are surely wrong. For one thing, even huge eagles are tender with their young, and protective. They have been photographed shredding prey into tiny meat slivers for new hatchlings, and curling their lethal talons away from the youngsters to keep from injuring them.

This little American Kestrel is almost ready for fledging.

Many years ago, Darwin pointed out that most vertebrates share a great deal of physiology, including the nerve networks. He wrote a book about it – The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. You may hear: “They don’t feel the way we do,” but feel they do, most definitely. The way we do? Probably it’s all in the same ballpark. Love, fear, curiosity, fury, joy. Communicated in whatever levels and languages are appropriate to the species.

My third raptor story features a young Cooper’s Hawk, one of those traditional forest hunters who have recently moved into towns and cities to fly down pigeons and snack at bird feeders. He was also one of five siblings, hatched and raised in a suburban back yard. A falconer caught the littlest one, a small male, and kept him for about ten days, feeding him and considering working with him as a hunting partner for awhile. But after a bit, he got to feeling guilty – he’s the keen observer of the Red-tail and Kestrel families, and here was a healthy young bird that surely needed to be with its parents not just to learn hunting refinements, which a falconer can help with, but the serious lesson of CAUTION. He took the little boy back to the yard where he’d trapped him.

Released – unhooded and unjessed – the youngster flew into the tree where he’d been seen often before his capture, a favorite perch. For ten minutes, he looked all around, anxiously – and called. After another ten minutes, the falconer was regretting having released this bird to a lonely spot – the others had, he thought, taken off. When suddenly, the parents both appeared, followed by another of the young. There was a rapturous reunion!

Just-hatched Cooper’s Hawklets. Note the “egg tooth,” which disappears in just a couple of days.

The lesson here is that though we humans believe we are better at most things than our wild neighbors, in truth wild parents are best after all. Finding food and killing it is only the beginning of successfully growing up among raptors. The other really critical area is avoiding predators. Even with parental care, 60 to 75 percent of young raptors die the first year for one reason or another (many of human origin), and the sad truth is that even falconry birds not taken from the wild as juveniles but raised by people, are often, without parental care, the victims of other predators – including other raptors – when they are flying.

So – though the overall odds do not seem good to us, chances are that Mother and Father Nature still do the best job of successfully raising young raptors!

Louie on his first day in his new mews. Note his short tail and “mohawk” hairdo. He is about 1.5 months old.

In June 2015, Louie, a baby Red-tailed Hawk, came to the California Raptor Center from the Stockton-Lodi area. A Good Samaritan who works at the Micke Grove Zoo found him in a park, covered in burrs. He looked dead. When she bent over him, however, he moved. She rushed him to the UC Davis Vet Med Hospital. He was severely dehydrated and emaciated, but to everyone’s surprise, he had no injuries. He was young and lively and recovered quickly. But without parents at a crucial age, he’d need a great deal of help getting ready to return to life in the wild.

So Louie was transferred to the Raptor Center, and from there, in late July, to me, in my role as falconer and volunteer with another rehabilitation group in northern California, for flight and hunt training.

Louie was unusually friendly, calling softly and readily eating from my hand. The calling was a bit of a worry – I wondered if he could he be imprinted on humans. It wasn’t likely that he was a classic imprint, because he was about a month old when found and most irreversible imprinting takes place within a few days of young hawks’ opening their eyes. Still, he’d been handled a great deal and probably hand-fed at the hospital.

Keenly aware that Louie was handicapped by not having a parent to teach him life’s important lessons, I set out training Louie via the standard falconer’s process: getting him to trust me and come to me for food. Then going on to encourage him to jump up to my fist for exercise and strength. Finally, letting him free fly while I would scare up his prey. Complex process!

In two days, Louie was flying to my glove with enthusiasm – and then some! Actually, he was grabbing at anything in my hand whenever I entered the mews. This isn’t good; a fearless raptor who thinks he’s starving and that a human is holding food is liable to snatch hotdogs right out of children’s hands. To understand how much of a problem this can be, look at Louie’s feet in the photo above! To offset this habit, I began to toss him his food tied to a lure, that is, a soft object on a cord to which food bits can be firmly attached. He learned what that was all about in one minute, and thereafter, while I couldn’t have him fly to the fist to exercise or eat his dinner, he’d go to the lure like a champ.

Louie on his lure, having dinner.

I worked with him daily. For a while every morning, I’d leave him leashed to a perch, wearing his hood, which prevents him from seeing and getting nervous. That allowed me to check him over, weigh him, and get him accustomed to my handling him. Then I would unhood him, reward him with tidbits on the lure, and take him out to fly him on a creance (falconry-speak for a long exercise leash). There are several ways of exercising birds of prey with flight training. The route I chose involved a parachute cord as a creance, tied to stakes set about 120 feet apart. A metal ring slides along on the cord, and to this you tie the leash. Louie could safely fly a nice distance and get exercise and a feel for the hunting experience, but he couldn’t veer away into the trees or take off for Canada.

He would sit on his perch at one end of the cord; I’d toss the lure with quail hunk somewhere in the middle and bobble it around on a string. He’d fly to “kill” his quarry, and when he’d footed it sufficiently (that’s how he kills prey – striking deep and hard with those razor talons) and had begun tearing at it with his beak, I’d approach slowly, low to the ground, talking softly, and offer him a piece of quail liver. He’d trade his “kill” for this raptor candy.

This was an important lesson, because to hunt with him, I had to be sure he’d come back to me. In this way, we could work together, getting better (both of us!) at finding and dispatching quarry, until he was ready for release. In creance training, he would do this routine a number of times and then I’d make sure he had a meal’s worth of the quail at the end, and let him, as we say, crop up – eat until he was satisfied. Then I’d wait a couple of days until he’d digested all that, meanwhile working on getting him more and more accustomed to me and to his hood and the carrying box. All necessities for any long-term work with a wild bird.

Louie, on the creance – the blue cord – killed his prey and I traded him a yummy piece of liver for it. In the old days, when falconry was a way of life for people and hawks, I would have taken the quarry at this point and eaten it myself! Photo: Mark Moore

Next step, oh lordy! Let him fly free! What a moment: Would he take off for the horizon? Or stick around to see what I was doing? He circled me, a great relief! And I tossed him a small rabbit (dead). Well, he was on it in a flash, hitting it hard. After he plucked at it and ate some, he let me approach him and came dutifully to my fist for his liver.

Now – could he actually hunt – spot and attack live wild prey and kill it? I released a rat near him. He saw it immediately, and killed it with one blow. Good boy, Louie! Some young birds don’t really seem to know right off how to kill the animal they have captured.

Louie was now ready for a series of live hunts, with me guaranteeing that he got a meal, win or lose, until he was an adept. But by now, I was, perforce, being urged by a couple of organizations who had an interest in him to get him quickly back out in the wild. I wasn’t happy with not having completed his hunt training to my satisfaction, but I was not my own boss.

Louie on his rabbit. Note the pale top of Louie’s tail. That is not normal RT coloring. I believe it came from the period when he was a starving and dehydrated baby. He had a significant “hunger line,” a kind of crimp, through all his tail feathers. The pale area was new growth above that.

So with Mark, a falconer friend, I reluctantly took Louie to a field near where he was hatched. We took off the jesses, leash, cut the anklets and – let him go. We tossed him a small rabbit (again, dead). He locked on. And we waited. And waited. We were hoping he’d fly into a tree to eat. But nearly an hour later, Little Louie was still frozen on his rabbit, clearly not knowing what to do or where to go. He was just going to sit there until something came along and ate both of them. Mark and I agreed that I had to get him back.

As I was frantically searching the car for a towel to toss over him, or for the bal chatri hawk trap, muttering about how I never had a net when I needed one, I heard Mark laugh, and looked up. There was Louie, sitting on Mark’s glove, clutching his rabbit and looking pleased with himself. He went into his carrying box without a flutter. On the half-hour ride back to civilization, he ate the entire rabbit. His crop, that stretchy area near the top of the esophagus, was almost as big as the rest of him.

Louie comes back for more

So Louie was, after all, in for more training. Every day was a challenge. I had injured my Achilles tendon and couldn’t walk well enough to take him into the field without help. Thanks to my gimpiness, Mark now had to play the part of the rabbit dog. But August isn’t the greatest time of year around these parts for lively wild rabbits, and though we rattled the bushes, Louie didn’t catch any. He was catching something, though, critters small enough that he’d gobbled them down by the time we got to him. And again he killed a number of rats and a couple of commercial quail.

We hacked him out, that is we released him and visited him every day or so with offerings of food. We chose a nice field with a stack of hay bales, Louie’s Castle. From this vantage point, Louie could fly against whatever he fancied, or wait for one of us to come along with meat to toss him. He could hide in the crevasses between the bales and keep watch. When he wasn’t there, he was usually hanging out in a grove of trees with another juvenile Red-tail.

Louie flying in the area where we released him for “hacking.” Note that he is missing a primary feather on each wing. He won’t get his full adult feathering until he’s two years old.

King Louie’s Castle. He kept look-out in the ramparts where he was safe from attack. Here, he’s hunkered down, watching us approach him along the farm road.

I’d drive up in my car, which he recognized instantly, and he’d fly over me, on the way to his Castle. I’d hobble along, kicking the weeds with my boot-cast. If something flushed, he’d make a dive on it. One day, as Mark was kicking the brush and I was limping along, I carelessly lifted my gloved hand. In a flash, Louie was winging toward me at speed. I kept my hand high to see what he’d do – and whop! he smacked it with all his might – the Louie version of a High Five!

Shortly thereafter, my foot got worse and walking became impossible, so Mark took over the “hunt.” In mid-September, he reported that Louie had come to the lure, even though he’d clearly eaten just before. He had a bulging crop. He was killing significant prey now. Time to say good-bye.

So the great day. Mark swung his lure and Louie saw it, but didn’t come in. Mark tied the lure to a bush and stepped back. Louie couldn’t resist! Even though he certainly couldn’t have been hungry. Mark walked up to him on the lure, and he stepped up onto the glove.

Good boy, Louie! The next morning, we took him to the field where we’d released him prematurely the month before. We had checked it out – yes, there were some adult Red-tails nearby, but the area is a wildlife refuge and there are plenty of trees to shelter in at night, and lots of prey. I’d bought him a piece of organic duck breast (yes, I know!) as a good-bye treat, and we cut off his anklets – and tossed him his reward.

Once more he just sat, clutching his booty, looking about – and I wanted with all my heart to get him back. But . . . but . . .

“He’ll be fine,” Mark and I said to each other. “He’s a good boy.” “He’s a survivor, look at what he went though, how determined he was.” “He’s powerful.” “Keep safe in a tree, Louie, when night falls and the owl calls!” “He’ll be fine.” He’ll be fine. He’ll make it. Good-bye, Louie, good-bye.

So I left my boy near where he’d hatched, but not too close to the park and its hordes of kids with hotdogs. There was hawk food all around and, with luck, not too many creatures who would eat him. This is where falconry sometimes fails its wild charges. The birds learn to hunt with human help much as they might with their parents. But the parents keep constant vigilance. They fly with their young and drive off hungry predators for weeks, before they say good-bye. Alas, we don’t know how to tell our little birds, “Watch the skies. Hide when the owls and raccoons come out at night.” So we falconers lose many of our birds, not just rehab ones, to other hungry creatures. In the wild as well, parental care notwithstanding, 75 – 80 percent of young raptors do not make it through the tough learning-curve of their first year. But I do believe that the ones with savvy parents have an edge.

Still, a bird we’ve worked with goes from 0 to some chance at life.

Months later, in Louie’s hay bale field, 30 miles from where he was released (30 miles is nothing to a hawk!), I saw a Red-tail Louie’s size with what looked like the odd bleached tail-top he sported. I stopped the car and whistled and waved my glove. The bird kept going. Not Louie, then. Louie, I suspect, all his life, will check out a waving glove or a swinging lure.

Louie’s unusual tail coloring – the light section at the top of the feathers is not “normal.”

It’s been a year since I met him. I miss him still.

July 1, a new year, in falconry time. I can get another orphan Red-tail who needs help figuring out the world. This time, I will make sure to keep my little one as long as I think he needs my support. Perhaps we’ll begin to sort out the hows and whys of caution.

The temptation, of course, as with all our younglings, is to keep them with us, safe forever. But the world, as you know in your heart, is not a safe place. And the lure of freedom is intoxicating. This balance, this measure between care and independence, hard though it is – isn’t it the best we can ask of life, after all?

A friend who knows more about human thinking than anyone else I know (and who pursues that form of enlightenment with a remarkable brain) has been writing me from Monhegan Island in Maine where she’s vacationing. She has been following my attempts to relaunch a young Red-tailed Hawk – he went out of the nest before he could fly and then was starving. He needs to fly strongly and hunt well to live successfully on his own.

My friend’s questions and observations are always probing: “This gull came up,” she wrote yesterday, “while we were sitting on a cliff that’s a popular place for day-trippers to eat lunch. Every gull on Monhegan knows that the 2-legged things drop food around & will even feed you if you do the begging behavior that worked on your parents. We had no food but he kept coming back to check. So where does that put him in the hierarchy of bird intelligence?”

Begging Gull on Monhegan Island – Stephanie Golden

What a question! Well, here goes. I think we get stuck in concepts that exist only in our minds and forget to do the deep observations. We judge other animals by ourselves, which means we often don’t understand the outside world very well. Every year, researchers learn more and more about the subtleties of the avian brain, for example. We used to sneer: “Bird brain!” at school companions we wanted to insult most deeply. Today we recognize that birds use different parts of their brains to perform some of the same tasks – problem solving – we use our gray wrinkles for. Some parrots, in some tests, have outperformed not just dogs and monkeys, but young humans.

We’ve long made a habit of misinterpreting the wild things we see, but since we are everywhere and powerful, they’ve had to learn to observe us with accuracy. At least where we interact. Your gull can predict your vacation behavior very nicely! My dog, who knows things that baffle me, predicts some of my daily movements. How did she figure out I was leaving the house? Oh. I put on my tennis shoes and not my moccasins. The hawk I’m working with learned in one day that my shed-door squeak means food will drop into his mews.

We humans, a single species, have many paths we can follow, many different possibilities. Birds have much the same, but not in any single species or group, except perhaps the corvids (crows, jays, etc.), who, like us, have shaken free of some of the shackles of inherited responses and depend to a fair degree on learning.

How did we get our flexible primate brains? Eons ago, by being in life situations where we had to get more adaptable, had to learn on the run more and more things, or our species would not have survived in a volatile world. We still have our built-in imperatives, of course. A human child who is not spoken to, or who has not interacted with other humans, by the age of three or four, I’m told, will be unable to learn any language fully. They have missed a developmental window.

Birds have smaller lives, in terms of years, and changes happen more quickly to them as species than to us, I think. And more economically. Humans are built for experimentation; animals can’t afford the time nor the space in their skulls for all that brainwork. Among the animals, those – including early humans – who live by killing creatures who know they are hunted seem to have developed more flexible (i.e., more experimental) brains and senses than the gatherers. This brain activity is expensive in terms of time, space, and energy, so most species develop what they need. They don’t go in for fancy useless stuff very often (though you might argue that the Bird of Paradise has. And humans have jumped the rails in a big way, with our production of food and medicines. We now have complex social mechanisms for helping our fellows who could not otherwise survive in our fast-changing society. I’m one such!)

In that evolutionary dance that made us and still rules under the cover of darkness, there are more prey animals than predators in every corner of Earth. Most are quite aware that they must work not to get killed, and use speed, camouflage, and various dodges to avoid death; but they have enemies so different and so skilled that they have had to develop an even more effective strategy – having many many young – in order for the species to go on. Humans’ number one enemy is the microbe, in all its varieties, wildly out-reproducing even us!

Populations are normally controlled by predation and competition with other species. But when things get abnormal, that rule melts away. In the late 1850s, a few rabbits were released in Australia by homesick Englishmen who wanted to hunt them. Rabbits there have only two predators, really, the dingo and the human, and little competition. In 10 years, they were so numerous that millions could be shot every year without putting a dent in the “infestation.” They still overrun parts of the continent; they have altered habitats and even microclimates! An introduced disease is the only thing that’s slowed them. (Microbes win again.)

Thanks to garbage, gulls are also proliferating, so if intelligence is reflected in numbers, gulls and rabbits must be in the top percentiles. Gulls are scavengers, big enough that they have few natural enemies aside from other gulls and maybe predatory fish. Humans don’t even kill them, as a general rule. In addition to scavenging, of course, gulls also prey on relatively “easy” kills. Wounded critters or babies or small fish. You don’t see them chasing a shorebird into the weeds and flushing it out nor do they dive down and chase fish under water with fancy swimming maneuvers. Gulls find shelled creatures in the shallows and drop them on rocks near the shore to expose the flesh. Corvids do much the same with walnuts and city traffic. That’s smart, all right! Some raptors do that as well – dropping bones and turtles on rocks and highways; many cache food while they’re feeding their babies. Researchers report finding 52 squirrel carcasses in one eagle nest.

Our young hawk getting the idea. Look at his tail: the top third is abnormally pale. That probably comes from his period of starvation and dehydration as he was developing. Wonder what his adult rusty tail feathers will look like!

Avian predators who regularly kill learn some serious moves, fitting them to their wing or body shape and size. Then Nature takes hold and exquisitely refines through breeding success, and with luck doesn’t trap the specialist in too small a niche. Some hawks learn to keep below and behind prey birds so they can fly them down before the victims see them. Others keep their bodies between their victims and the sun so they will be harder to see. Peregrines have the hardest, smoothest feathers of all, because they need them in high-speed dives. Red-tails, those large “slow” pounce hunters, have moved into cities and learned to fly down the wily and speedy pigeon.

Research indicates that crows can teach their young about dangers the youngsters have not yet encountered. And tigers in Siberia have been known to get enraged at a single hunter and spend years learning his habits and tracking him down. I like to think both these can be defined as “intelligent” in several ways – long-term purpose; remembered observations; teaching concepts; planning future actions. Crows are probably on the way up in numbers, but tigers, alas, are on the way out. They are too big and dangerous to live close to people and they eat too many of the same things. They don’t have time to make the complex changes survival in the human’s world requires (turning into house-cat sized hunters, for instance!) We humans are fast creating a mass-extinction event.

Which then is most intelligent? Well, each non-human predator – gull, tiger, hawk – has the kind of intelligence it needs to survive in the habitat it is adapting to, with the survival tools it was born with (which in time its descendants might refine, but probably not exchange for totally different ones). Among birds, the hawk needs different skills from say a heron or a robin, and it has to learn what seems to me to be more complex interactions and comprehensions. Different raptors use different kinds of habitat, different skills, different body shapes. They have to be a bit adaptable, too, or like the Spotted Owl, they will be wiped out when their world changes. That bird is not keeping up with what we are doing in the forests. Its close cousin, the Barred Owl, on the other hand, has learned to nest anywhere and eat a broad menu. It is thriving.

Young Red-tail gets a taste of freedom. He won’t go far, though. Not yet. If you look closely, you can spot the transmitter attached to the top of a tail feather. When he’s bored with our games, we’ll “wild hack” him – turn him loose in good hunting territory that’s relatively safe for him, and monitor his progress as he figures things out. It could take awhile. And despite our care and feeding and encouragement, he might not make it. Working with wild animals can be hard on the heart.

I don’t see this kind of refined behavior in gulls. But I haven’t studied gulls, and surely they have many subtleties I am unaware of. They do learn to watch humans and change their habits accordingly. My friend’s gull has learned, maybe he was taught it as a gull-let by his parents, that it pays to keep checking humans for dropped or offered food. Around here (Central California), gulls flock to landfills by the hundreds of thousands, where they “spoil” the salable detritus with tons of acid droppings. Some falconers make a living by getting their raptors to chase them away. One guy I know works at a landfill in the Central Valley. The gulls quickly learned to recognize his truck, and they leave as soon as they see it. He doesn’t even have to fly his falcons at them any more.

Our brains are interesting, and entertaining when they are not being troublesome. But we have used them to destroy, as I believe forever, the planet that has made and shaped us. Not all the elephants who ever lived could destroy enough territory to do that. So if numbers reflect intelligence, humans, rats, gulls, and microbes win. But surely intelligence ought to have something to do with the long term – a species’ overall effect on its environment.

Therefore, in the hierarchy of effective intelligence, my vote goes not to a predator at all, but to the tree. It provides the planet with oxygen, it absorbs carbon dioxide, it creates its own food, it holds water and moves it from earth to air to produce our climate, it feeds its neighbors, it provides housing for millions, and doesn’t seem to kill its neighbors except by falling on them or passively stealing their light. With the tree as king, Earth could probably go on self-creating forever. Unless, of course, a good sized meteor came along and smashed it to smithereens. There are no guarantees!

Afterthoughts: First: as I was thinking these things over, I took my little orphan hawk hunting. A falconer friend stirred up a quail, which the naive little killer riding on my glove just didn’t see. The quail flurried up, dropped, vanished. For a long time, we tried to find it among the weeds. But the lowly prey critter had seen the hawk and remained hunkered down, not moving even as our big feet brushed by. It’s this kind of smarts that keeps the world turning. Tightening the relationships, refining the interactions.

The little hawk a week after his “wild hack”: we released him on some hay bales in a large field, and followed him with the transmitter/receiver for two days. Then he went out of range. Four days later, hungry, he showed up on these bales, made a few nice attack flights as the falconer kicked up prey in the bushes, but caught nothing. And then happily ate an offered meal. Photo: Mark Moore

Second: After I’d posted the version above, my friend wrote: “. . .the last part about the tree’s ‘intelligence’ might be pushing it a bit.” Well, yes, it might! I’d thrown that thought out to get ideas going (this is what makes our brains fun to play with). So: Does the tree think? Well, does a being have to have a recognizable brain in order to have a creative response to life? Can you do it with a notochord? Or a collection of receptor cells generating a chemical response to certain stimuli? After all, plants are popularly reported to respond to us, and octopi react to humans in ways that certainly look like “thought.”

I hope we last long enough to find, not answers necessarily, but at least more precise questions. The dance of discovery never ends! And there will never be any guarantees. . .

In February, after decades of study and rehabilitation work with raptors, I became an apprentice falconer.

My first task, and one I needed to do quickly to get in a full four months of work with a raptor in my first year (ending July 1), was to trap one of the two birds permitted to apprentices: juvenile Red-tail Hawk or American Kestrel.

With the help of a falconer friend and mentor, on February 8, I trapped a young, male RT, who had a crop full of plastic and what looked like old mattress material. He was hungry! And wonder of wonders, 6 out of 12 tail feathers were the adult “red.” The other half were the typical the juvie stripes. Something had pulled out half his tail probably at least two months earlier. And he’d grown in his “seconds.” Naturally, I named him “Six-Pak.”

Sixy and I worked well together. He, like all birds, with their complicated brains, is smart – he caught the routine right away, and learned that if he came to my glove when I whistled, he got food. He never became tame – he was in fact a golden-eyed fierce boy always. Those extraordinary eyes are my banner now. But he was compliant, and in less than three weeks, he was flying on a creance (long leash), distances of 120 feet or more at my whistle and raised glove.

And then, in a freak accident, he broke his leg. I rehabbed him, with guidance from Dr. Brian Speer, DVM, of the Bird Medical Center in Oakley, CA. On his and my mentor’s advice, I decided that, since Six-Pak was a consummate bater – that is, when he was bored or nervous, he would fly hard and fast off the fist – I would not tie and fly him on a line again. Instead, I used Operant Conditioning techniques to get him to fly from perch to perch in a sizable cage, at my signal. He picked this up quickly, and performed with what looked like enjoyment every day for six weeks.

On June 14, I took him back where I found him, and let him go. Almost before we could get his hood off, he bopped off the fist and then shot away, out over a large field. And climbed into a splendid soar – up and up, down, up again, spiraling for 2,000 feet or more, for a full 15 or 20 minutes (how strong!). And then away.

A Visit to the Green Hills of Central California

On a recent drive in the Central Valley where we were monitoring Golden Eagles, a falconer friend and I saw a number of wonderful raptors, among them a gorgeous Ferruginous Hawk – the largest of the North American buteo hawks and a winter visitor for this area. These are regal birds, the most common variant having pale overall feathering with strong accent markings. They have a particularly glowering eye (owing to a deep supraorbital ridge or brow, like an eagle’s) and an unusually large mouth opening (gape). They also possess exceedingly powerful feet. The toes may not be long, but oh, they are strong.

Ferruginous Hawk, Buteo regalis, in the Central Valley, CA. Many large raptors seek the vantage of power poles where they can both see prey and spot danger. The power poles also often present a hazard to the large birds – the possibility of electrocution.

These birds do not breed in California, but in more central and northern US prairie habitats, where they build large nests on the ground or in low bushes. They come down to us to when the prairie winds are biting, and use those power-feet to capture ground squirrels and jackrabbits, which abound in the Valley. These mammals, well armed and strong themselves, are also the favorite prey of the Golden Eagles in the area, and it is not unlikely that we may see some hunting-territory squabbles in the course of future monitoring trips.

Our wild one bumped off the pole and was gone in minutes

We don’t often notice it, because animals are more subtle and careful than we are, but nothing is safe out in the wild, not for a minute. No creature, not even the predator, can let its fierce intent and brilliant attention waver, not for a blink, or other killers awaiting just such an opportunity will seize the moment.

Our prize of the morning – even more exciting than the two Goldens soaring up and over the green ranch hills – was an enormous female Prairie Falcon, perched on a power pole where she could keep watch for potential dinner.

I had never seen one in the wild before, and oh, she is beautiful! She tolerated our approach in the car well enough for me to get a nice series of photographs.

Prairie Falcon, Falco mexicanus, looking right at us.

These birds do breed in Northern California, most famously in the coastal caves and cliffs of Pinnacles National Monument south of San Francisco, and they love the prey-rich valley in winter. Prairies are strictly North American falcons, and unlike the more cosmopolitan Peregrines, prey on mammals as well as birds. This one has the feet to prove it. Look at her long powerful toes and sharp talons (picture below) – they can easily subdue a large rabbit, and her sharp, notched beak can neatly sever the spinal cord, thus sparing her a dangerous struggle.

Falcons display a noticeable size difference between male and female with little overlap, so she is surely she. Note, in the photos above, her nice large head and the broad shoulders. (Few raptors show gender color or feathering differences.)

The Ferruginous females, on the other hand, like most buteo hawks, have some overlap in weight ranges with the males and they are not easily distinguished at a distance. Or even up close, sometimes. The California Raptor Center in Davis had a resident non-releasable Ferruginous for many years, named Thor. He had flown into a train near Reno, Nevada, and survived the collision. Thor could not fly after his recovery, and lived at the Raptor Center for many years. On his death, the vets discovered he was a (small) she.

Thor, note twisted right wing from his collision with a train. Also not the thick toes and long talons.

Portrait of Thor – note the bony ridge over the eye and the broad gape of the mouth.

Anyone care to scroll up to the first pictures and guess the wild one’s gender?